Idea for impending preventive care crush

When we seek out health care services, most of the time it is not for anything serious. A sore throat. A prescription refill. Maybe an eye exam or a flu shot.

And if we're doing it right - accessing routine care and staying healthy - that's most of the care we'll need. Preventive care is designed to keep us out of the hospital emergency room and to stave off more serious illnesses such as diabetes.

It's also a lot less expensive.

That's why prevention is one of principles on which the federal Affordable Care Act is built.

The pharmacist, the nurse practitioner and other medical professionals, such as optometrists, who see patients far more routinely, are the key to providing preventive care. The problem is, if you live in California, then you don't have the same access to the level of care available from these types of highly educated, highly trained health workers, who have a great deal of experience diagnosing disease.

Nurse practitioners, who have more than eight years of schooling and certification, can't see patients on their own in California, even for something as simple as diagnosing a sinus infection. But their colleagues in other states can.

Pharmacists here can't help patients adjust their medications when they detect negative side effects, even though their four-year doctoral training taught them to do exactly that.

Optometrists have studied pharmacology as much as have physicians, dentists and podiatrists, but they are allowed to do little more in this state than measure eyesight and prescribe lenses.

It's all because of outdated state laws and regulations that were put in place decades ago when our health care system looked very different. The laws are still on the books but medical services have modernized.

This is a problem: Our state's health care delivery system is already overcrowded. More than two-thirds of the state's counties already qualify as medically underserved because of the ratio of doctors to patients. In January, the Affordable Care Act will be fully in place, and in California that means some 4.7 million people will be newly eligible for health insurance.

The law will flood our state's health care system and, without any additional action, lead to longer wait times to see a doctor, a diminished quality of care provided, and unnecessary complications from illnesses that could have been addressed or even prevented.

The Legislature is working on a solution.

Three bills authored by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina (Los Angeles County), will clear some of the red tape that ties the hands of trained, experienced medical professionals.

If nothing's done, then the quality of health care available in California will be severely diminished within a matter of months, and that will lead to increased illness.

Hernandez's package of bills deserve to be heard, debated and passed - urgently.

Beth Haney is president of the California Association for Nurse Practitioners. Micah Weinberg is the senior policy adviser for the Bay Area Council.